architecture

The main architectural choices made in the Conzept application are:

Keep things simple, web native and fun to code and maintain. Performance is secondary.

Use embedded iframes (and self-hosted app URLs) as a form of simple, well-isolated, micro-services. To the user it should feel as one application. (See also: Perlis-Thompson principle, narrow-waist)

Use declarative data definitions where needed (examples: sections, fields, topic tags and indicators). Avoid code duplication where possible, instead use use expressive data structures parsed by minimal code.

The communication between Conzept and embedded apps is done using URL-parameters (examples: title-string, entity ID, ISO2/3 language code, URL) and postMessage() function calls.
- Note: Some styling of embedded apps is also applied by directly setting common CSS classes on the body-element of the iframe (such as the “dark” class for dark-mode styles, or the “rtl” class for right-to-left language-scripts).

Use vanilla JS (avoid complex frameworks inverting control), with jQuery for managing the DOM.
- jQuery - and the jQuery-dependent plugins - may be removed or replaced in the future, if possible and beneficial.
- When needed: use WebAssembly for performance-demanding, compute parts in the code. (eg. for OCR).

Main types of data-types to use: plain strings, URLs, Wikidata Qid's, JSON and JS object lists.

Allow the safe use of eval() needed for flexible field definitions. This is safe, as only the admins/devs can update the field definitions. Conzept is also a mainly client-side application, with no user-data being stored on the server.

If some (relatively complex) HTML-widget needs to be used in many different places: consider creating a web component. This was done for the organism occurrence map.

URL structure

Conzept is mainly based around URLs and iframes.

Let's first look at some example URLs and then look at all the available parameters.

conze.pt/explore/Semantic_Web (Minimal URL with a query-string. The user-language will be based on: the stored language setting, the browser language or simply fallback to English.)

conze.pt/explore/?l=en&t=wikipedia-qid&i=Q5483435&s=true (Load a certain Wikidata Q-ID topic. It will try to load it as a Wikipedia article, or else fallback to showing the Wikidata page.)

There are various parameters available to structure URLs.

parameter	description	default value
l	language	“en”
t	action-type	“wikipedia”
i	Wikidata Q-identifier (qid)
u	URL-string
c	custom data
s	sidebar visibility	true
v	view-mode requested, can be “desktop” or “mobile”	(determined by the device type, but can be overruled)
c	custom data field (its format is not specified)

The types parameter (“t”) in Conzept URLs indicated what type of content should be loaded.

The following action-types are available:

type	argument data-type	description
wikipedia	string	request the Wikipedia page
wikipedia-qid	Wikidata qid	request the Wikipedia or the Wikidata page (in that order)
link-split	url	load two content panes and load the URL into the first content pane, in the second-content pane load the Wikipedia page for the search-string
articles	string	(only used internally) to update the sidebar with a new string-search (and not update the content area)
random	string	(only used internally) to load a random Wikipedia topic
wander	string	loads the Wander-app to show a series of YouTube videos (note: this type may be removed in the future)